Cataclysm Bear Theorycraft

Were you factoring in the innate damage reduction that bears have as ferals? That might correct some of the issues with spell damage and specials.

From my testing savage defense (and all absorb mechanics) act as if it wasn't there for the purposes of rage gain; this has been true for a while now.

I did forget about the 12% reduction from Natural Reaction. I didn't catch it because that factor was just being lumped into "a". The major development from this is that "a" = 18.92, not 21.5 like I had before.

I'll let people figure out their Unmitigated Damage on their own because calculating it from damage taken can depend on a lot of factors. The armor reduction would always be active, but it changes if you have Natural Reaction, or if you have barkskin up, or an outside CD or whatever. The point is that all of that stuff has no impact on rage generated as it scales off of the unmitigated damage, not what you actually receive. I'll change the "a" value in the other post. Thanks for catching that Fellhoof.

As for Savage defense, I assumed that it wouldn't matter, but I just haven't officially tested it yet so I didn't want to jump to conclusions.

Savage DefenseSavage Defense now process 50% of the time on crits, granting a shield of 75% of AP. With feral spec, that is increased to 99%, and mastery rating increases that further. This amount is very significant in dungeons. Need to test what all crits proc it.

I don't think that it has been mentioned yet, but I believe that Savage Defense is now set to 65% of your AP."Each time you deal a critical strike while in Bear Form, you have a 50% chance to gain Savage Defense, reducing the damage taken from the next physical attack that strikes you by 65% of your attack power."- MMO-Champion - Druid Cataclysm OR Savage Defense (the change was made, or at least posted on mmo on the 30th of September)

I figured out the magic damage rage mechanics and I also have a slight change to the melee mechanics.

First the melee change. Something else is going on with the Natural Reaction talent. I tested rage gain from melee while not speced into NR and the results were very strange. The constant changed in a way not consistent with anything I would have predicted. It still uses the equation R = UD*a/H, but "a" became 20.1. That isn't the "a" with NR divided by 0.88, but it still seems to have some effect. I also found that damage reduction CDs like Barkskin and SI actually do affect rage gain. Again, I will need to do more testing to figure out exactly how. I can say that the armor gained from Thick Hide is handled the same as armor from gear. Having Thick Hide or not does not change rage gain in any way.

Magic damage, as it turns out, is exactly the opposite from melee damage. The rage gain from magic damage is based completely on the damage taken, not on the damage before modifiers. I tested with and without Perseverance and with and without Barkskin up and none of it mattered. The damage you actually take is what determines rage from magic damage. It is like melee in that you always get at least 1 rage from any damage. That means every dot tic, every tic from a channeled spell, every direct hit will always give at least one rage no matter how small. Unlike melee damage, a miss gives zero rage. The equation for R > 2 is:

When R < 2 I think the equation is (the method I'm using to find the value of "a" doesn't work in this range so I am just extrapolating from what I can see. I have no empirical data for this, but it should be pretty close):

R = 1 + D*a1/H where a1 = 20.25

I'll try to figure out what using CDs on melee damage does to rage gain if I have time, but otherwise I think this about wraps it up. If you have any further questions about rage mechanics make a post and I'll try to answer it.

A few things I've noticed in testing out things on Elites solo in the world and in 5 mans on live. I hope this helps you guys, I haven't seen it mentioned before; and certainly hope I'm just not being stupid or blind.

Faerie Fire Feral does not proc Omen of Clarity, Leader of the Pack Heal, or Savage Defense. Tested by only using Faerie Fire on Pustulent Horrors, 100 applications of Faerie fire netted 0 procs.

Fury Swipes procs can proc Omen of Clarity.

Vengeance will not be applied if you fully absorb an attack from Savage Defense. Also for resisted damage and partially absorbed damage you will only gain vengeance for the amount of damage you take. The absorbed portion does not give attack power. I need to further test this for priest and paladin shields. However, my assumption is this is intended. As a side note there seems to be a approx 3 second internal timer. If you do not take damage for 3 seconds it will start to decay or fall off at a steady rate. This will decay in combat, so a steady stream of absorbs and dodges can cause you to lose a fair amount of attack power from this ability. It also drops at ~10% of initial attack power every second after the first 'tick'. Taking damage naturally resets this.

Berserk Mangle procs, do not have an internal cool down. This doesn't help on single target encounters, as Lacerate dot damage isn't affected by haste currently. Just a fun thing I found out in 5 man randoms. Multiple lacerates on different targets will cause the proc to happen faster than than your GCD. This has caused me to change up my rotation a bit when dealing with pugs that cannot seem to focus their dps on any specific target. I have simply started to tab target single applications of Lacerate onto the group of mobs, while using Mangle every time it's up on which ever mob I'm in danger of losing threat on. While using Swipe on cool down to help keep threat on the other targets.

EDIT

A noticed side affect with Vengeance and the New Frenzied Regeneration, when you take damage with Frenzied Regeneration up your capped Vengeance will also go up. So Vengeance works off your current HP total. The interesting note is that once an HP boost is removed your Vengeance AP will not drop as long as you continue to receive damage. For example in a perfect encounter where you can stay at maximum Vengeance AP. If you have ~60k HP, and the 6k AP from Vengeance. Then use Frenzied Regeneration bringing your hp to 78k. The Vengeance new maximum will be 7.8k and that will not fall off or reset when Frenzied Regeneration ends. It will also remain at 7.8k so long as you continue to take damage to not start the 10% decay. However, if it does decay; you will not get that AP back until after your vengeance AP is below your current maximum health.

EDIT:

There also appears to be a truncated decimal in there. If you have 1 AP when you stop taking damage it will still take 10 seconds for vengeance to wear off. Not sure what the effect of this will be in the long term, the good news is that no matter what AP you do have, the fall off will be the same.

Updated the OP for the latest build, and spent a few hours analyzing Vengeance in detail. It's still somewhat foggy, but here's the best understanding of how Vengeance works that I've got so far:

1. When you first take damage, you immediately gain Vengeance, equal to 5% of the damage taken. From then on, Vengeance 'ticks' every 2 seconds.2. When it ticks, it checks how much damage you've taken since the last time it ticked, and does either step 3, or step 4:3. If DamageTaken > 0, new Vengeance is set to: [OldVengeance*0.95 + DamageTaken*0.05]4. If DamageTaken = 0, new Vengeance is set to: [OldVengeance - MaxVengeance*0.1] (Where MaxVengeance is the highest this stack of Vengeance has ever been)

This has the interesting effect that when you're taking steady/constant X damage per tick (2sec), your Vengeance stack approaches X AP.This also has a concerning effect that if you're fighting a boss that attacks slower than 2.0 (ie, they're a standard 2.0 attack speed, and you've slowed them with Infected Wounds or similar), then some of the ticks are going to line up between melee attacks, and you're going to suffer that large -10% decay. That's going to significantly lower the average Vengeance AP on any slow-attacking bosses.

EDIT: Oh, another concern: assuming the boss isn't incredibly fast hitting (1sec or faster), every time you dodge/miss, that's a tick of no damage taken, so -10% decay. That means that avoidance will be detrimental to threat by a small amount. (However, remember, avoidance also increases your rage income, so that may be offset somewhat/all)

I moved a conversation from here to the WOTLK Bear thread, so if you're looking for it you will find it there.

i miss raiding with carebare :< she makes me feel like i am not the only person that hates everyoneAldriana: I am an asshole, it just so happens that some of my colleagues are even *bigger* assholes.[R] [85:Neux:2]: i hear if you die on Good Friday they are going to make it where you can't get rezzed until easter sundayKhazal: Yeah, I don't know about Magic Rainbow Unicorn Land, but here in Reality, Rhyolith is the worst encounter Blizzard has ever designed.

Updated the OP for the latest build, and spent a few hours analyzing Vengeance in detail. It's still somewhat foggy, but here's the best understanding of how Vengeance works that I've got so far:

1. When you first take damage, you immediately gain Vengeance, equal to 5% of the damage taken. From then on, Vengeance 'ticks' every 2 seconds.2. When it ticks, it checks how much damage you've taken since the last time it ticked, and does either step 3, or step 4:3. If DamageTaken > 0, new Vengeance is set to: [OldVengeance*0.95 + DamageTaken*0.05]4. If DamageTaken = 0, new Vengeance is set to: [OldVengeance - MaxVengeance*0.1] (Where MaxVengeance is the highest this stack of Vengeance has ever been)

This is what I have thus far as well. Thanks to Astrylian for giving me the above calculations. First off my calculation thus far has one major flaw and that is, it doesn't take account for when your max HP changes mid fight. I'm sure there'll be more, but this is based off the information I have so far; and it's been a while since I did this kind of math. T.T

Edit:Added the calculation for when Vengeance reaches HP cap. It ~should~ be complete now. I've submitted variables and haven't found any errors as of yet. Though please do double check the formula.

Variables

CurrentMaximumHealth = Current HP at time of checkCurrentVengeance = New Vengeance total AP after calculationOldVengeance = Previous Vengeance total AP at time of calculationTotalDamageTaken = Amount of damage taken since last checkMaxVengeance = The highest amount of AP you have had since last taking damage

I don't think so. I've run some tests, and I found that for instance the calculation of the damage done by Pulverize are not increased by 451 per stack, but by 235 ( more or less 5 ). I tried also to check for informations about these numbers for 4.0 ( and asked in the FAQ ) but without interesting results.

# Savage Defense is massively overpowered on beta and has been dealt with accordingly. Many of the reports of beta raid bosses two-shotting tanks were because that was how much damage the bosses needed to do in order to challenge Feral tanks. With less damage absorbed, the boss damage can be adjusted downwards. We've reduced the multiplier for attack power on the absorption effect (from 65% to 35%, still modified by mastery) and it no longer procs from periodic critical hits.

Confirmed this is active in beta. I'm trying to confirm scaling with mastery on gear is unaffected, I'll update when I find out if no one else beats me to it.

Bear Form -- Stamina bonus lowered from 20% to 10% and Heart of the Wild health bonus from 10% to 6%. Bear health should be close to plate tank health with this change.

More changes said to be in 4.0.3a for bears by Zarhym. Seems they are bringing everyone's "shield wall" to be exactly the same just with different names. The health changes seem a tad excessive with the SD change. Really hope they at least allow lacerate ticks to still proc SD.

While bears are missing parry we have a higher dodge, so the total avoidance tends to be the same. And yes, Savage Defense is and was brutal on the live servers and in the beta. With a little bit of luck you were able to absorb entire bossfights into your SD (or reduced the incoming amage to a value where the healer could keep you alive whith much less effort than needed for other tank). A change was neccessarry - I just hope that item scaling after T11 will still be good enough without additional changes / re-balancing.

The Bear 'rotation' in Cataclysm is significantly more complex than it was in WotLK (a good thing!). Here is my work so far on modeling those rotations:

Optimally, bears should choose their abilities based on a priority list. However, the order of that priority list can change with gear level. There are effectively 10 elements to a bear priority list, which I have labeled a-k for convenience, in no particular order:

Next, I evaluated the potential performance of each ability at a very wide variety of gear levels: from practically naked (1000ap), to entry level raiding (10000ap), to what I'd guess is well past Deathwing gear (100000ap). From that, I was able to see which abilities trumped which other abilities, at the varying gear levels. I extrapolated that into a chart:

[table] |a|b|c|d|e|f|g|h|i|j|ka|X||||||||||b|<|X|||||||||c|>|>|X||||||||d|>|>|<|X|||||||e|?|>|<|<|X||||||f|<|?|<|<|<|X|||||g|<|?|<|<|<|<|X||||h|<|>|<|<|<|<|>|X|||i|<|?|<|<|<|<|?|<|X||j|<|>|<|<|?|?|>|?|?|X|k|<|?|<|<|<|?|?|<|<|<|X[/table]Where < means that the ability on top is better than the ability on the left.And > means that the ability on the left is better than the ability on the top.And ? means that which ability is better can vary based on gear.

NOTE:Values here are based on damage, threat, and raid utility. Rage cost could potentially be significant, and I hope to redo this with rage cost being weighted as well, but I don't think it will change anything. The primary thing it would change would be to allow FF to beat the things it can already beat, but at earlier gear levels (FFF scales better than Swipe and Lacerate). Regardless, in my experience, you have enough rage, even in entry level gear, to fully fill every GCD; more rage just lets you afford Maul more.

OK, now we've got a list of possible priority lists that are useful. Next, how to evaluate them for a given character? Well, that's a very difficult question. Up until now, nothing has been Rawr-specific about any of this. And perfectly accurately evaluating these rotations, which include randomness, in a closed form solution is going to be difficult (though not impossible) and time-consuming. So, in the interest of getting things done faster (since Dec7th is rapidly approaching), but still being as accurate as possible, I've taken a different route for now (I fully intend to revisit this later on and write a closed form model for it).

That route is to write a separate (outside of Rawr) simulator, to simulate combat using each of these priority lists, and output a count of the uses of each ability. Simulations are good for certain things, and this seems to be one of them. Here's the results, using a 5min (200 GCDs) fight, and assuming you have the Endless Carnage talent:

For Rawr4's initial Cataclysm release, Rawr.Bear will include those numbers, just hard-coded in the code, for each of the 30 possible priority lists that it evaluates for each character. From those numbers, we can evaluate the rotation in terms of threat and damage for a given character.

The Bear 'rotation' in Cataclysm is significantly more complex than it was in WotLK (a good thing!). Here is my work so far on modeling those rotations:

Hey Astrylian, been a while!

I have been trying to figure out where the crossover for FFF /swipe/lacerate is for my move suggester/debuff addon. Using the scales in the OP, I have put together a little spreadsheet which seems to indicate that lacerate pulls ahead of swipe around 7k-15k depending on talents and debuffs. FFF doesn't seem to overtake Lacerate till 2 or 3 times that (again, depending on debuffs and talents). I'm not sure I have the stacking correct for the damage multipliers and I am assuming the spell damage debuffs apply to FFF (since it seems to be using the spell crit multiplier). I don't know how much AP we are talking about beyond t11, but it seems like a lot before FFF becomes a threat bonus over Lacerate (though it does do more damage per hit much sooner).

Regardless, in my experience, you have enough rage, even in entry level gear, to fully fill every GCD; more rage just lets you afford Maul more.

agreed. although another item to consider with filler (especially if you have multiple mobs) is that lacerate has its base threat, damage, and rage cost, but also procs, at 30% per tick, free mangle and allows for the high threat/damage of mangle with no rage cost as well as frees up more rage to dump into maul. If you are spreading the lacerate love around on multiple target you can mangle/maul more often. We will need to run these numbers once Rawr 4 is up.